poem of the week

Poem of the Week, by Jim Harrison

Posted on by alisonmcghee

June the Horse
– Jim Harrison

Sleep is water. I’m an old man surging
upriver on the back of my dream horse
that I haven’t seen since I was ten.
We’re night riders through cities, forests, fields.

I saw Stephanie standing on the steps of Pandora’s Box
on Sheridan Square in 1957. She’d never spoken
to me but this time, as a horse lover, she waved.

I saw the sow bear and two cubs. She growled
at me in 1987 when I tried to leave the cabin while her cubs
were playing with my garbage cans. I needed a drink
but I didn’t need this big girl on my ass.

We swam up the Neva in St. Petersburg in 1972
where a girl sat on the bank hugging a red icon
and Raskolnikov, pissed off and whining, spat on her feet.

On the Rhône in the Camargue fighting bulls
bellowed at us from a marsh and 10,000 flamingos
took flight for Africa.

This night-riding is the finest thing I do at age seventy-two.
On my birthday evening we’ll return to the original
pasture where we met and where she emerged from the pond
draped in lily pads and a coat of green algae.
We were children together and I never expected her return.

One day as a brown boy I shot a wasp nest with bow and arrow,
releasing hell. I mounted her from a stump and without
reins or saddle we rode to a clear lake where the bottom
was covered with my dreams waiting to be born.
One day I’ll ride her as a bone-clacking skeleton.
We’ll ride to Veracruz and Barcelona, then up to Venus.
—
For more information on Jim Harrison, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jim-harrison
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Poem of the Week, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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If thou must love me, let it be for nought
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (from Sonnets for the Portuguese)

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
‘I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day’—
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.


—
For more information on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/152
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Poem of the Week, by Patricia Fargnoli

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Roofmen
– Patricia Fargnoli

Over my head the roofmen are banging shingles into place
and over them the sky shines with a light that is
almost past autumn, and bright as copper foil.

In the end I will have something to show for their hard labor–
unflappable shingles, dry ceilings, one more measure of things
held safely in a world where safety is impossible.

In another state, a friend tries to keep on living
though his arteries are clogged,
though the operation left a ten-inch scar

and, near his intestines, an aneurysm blossoms
like a deformed flower. His knees and feet
burn with constant pain.

We go on. I don’t know how sometimes.
For a living, I listen eight hours a day to the voices
of the anxious and the sad. I watch their beautiful faces

for some sign that life is more than disaster–
it is always there, the spirit behind the suffering,
the small light that gathers the soul and holds it

beyond the sacrifices of the body. Necessary light.
I bend toward it and blow gently.
And those hammerers above me, bend into the dailiness

of their labor, beneath concentric circles: a roof of sky,
beneath the roof of the universe,
beneath what vaults over it.

And don’t those journeymen
hold a piece of the answer– the way they go on
laying one gray speckled square after another,

nailing each down, firmly, securely.


—
For more information on Patricia Fargnoli, please click here: http://www.joefargnoli.com/
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Poem of the Week, by Carole Satyamurti

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Life on Mir
– Carole Satyamurti  (Note: Mir was the former Russian space station)

       
They took small fish, to observe
the effects of weightlessness in water.

Goldfish, ordinary on earth, were now
miraculous, their glitter precious currency,
their tiny mouths’ O and O a greeting.

So that when they died some men wept,
feeling, as if for the first time,
how grave a life is. Any life at all.

—
For more information on Carole Satyamurti, please click here: http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/carolesatyamurtibiog.html

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Poem of the Week, by Mark Irwin

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Woolworth’s
– Mark Irwin (for Gerald Stern)

Everything stands wondrously multicolored
and at attention in the always Christmas air.
What scent lingers unrecognizably
between that of popcorn, grilled cheese sandwiches,

malted milkballs, and parakeets? Maybe you came here
in winter to buy your daughter a hamster
and were detained by the bin

of Multicolored Thongs, four pair
for a dollar. Maybe you came here to buy
some envelopes, the light blue par avion ones

with airplanes, but caught yourself, lost,
daydreaming, saying it’s too late over the glassy
diorama of cakes and pies. Maybe you came here

to buy a lampshade, the fake crimped
kind, and suddenly you remember
your grandmother, dead

twenty years, floating through the old
house like a curtain. Maybe you’re retired,
on Social Security, and came here for the Roast

Turkey Dinner, or the Liver and Onions,
or just to stare into a black circle
of coffee and to get warm. Or maybe

the big church down the street is closed
now during the day, and you’re homeless and poor,
or you’re rich, or it doesn’t matter what you are

with a little loose change jangling in your pocket,
begging to be spent, because you wandered in
and somewhere between the bin of animal crackers

and the little zoo in the back of the store
you lost something, and because you came here
not to forget, but to remember to live.

—
For more information on Mark Irwin, please click here: http://www.markirwinauthor.com/
—
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Poem of the Week, by Aria Dominguez

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The Things I Cannot See
– Aria Dominguez

The corner store went up in flames, and he talked about it for weeks.
An armada of fire engines, lights flashing: a two year-old’s dream.
The smoke, the steam, the frozen spray coating
the trees, bushes, and house next door.

Then the shell was demolished, yet more excitement.
Crane, wrecking ball, backhoe, dump trucks,
construction workers directing traffic
in yellow safety vests.

All year, every time we drove by the vacant lot.
he pointed out, There’s where the building burned down!
He wouldn’t let me forget the fire I fear, how easy it could be
to find myself out in the cold watching our life blaze into ashes.

At the end of summer, a construction fence went up
as hard hatted surveyors measured and planned.
One day we passed the site to find it crawling with machines,
excavation of the foundation begun.

Momma! he screamed with what seemed overmuch fervor,
even for diggers in action. He shrieked, Where are the plants?
The plants are gone! Indeed, the neck-high weeds blanketing the property
had been ground up under the metal tracks of the equipment.

I told him the plants were to be replaced with a new building,
thinking he would be excited to watch it go up. But he began to sob,
No, make them put the plants back. I loved those plants.
They were green and had pretty flowers. Put them back!

I tried to explain that they were just weeds. I tired to explain
that many in the neighborhood have no cars
and nowhere else to walk for food. People often say
he is a kid you can explain things to, but there was no explaining this.

All I could do was pull over and hold him as he wept for the death
of flowers sown by the wind, the loss
of green growing for the sake of being green, the emptiness
of the earth left to do what it will.

—
Aria Dominguez is a Minneapolis poet and photographer. For more information on some of her work, please click here for information on the Powderhorn 365 Project: http://www.powderhorn365.com/index.php?/categories/54-Aria-Dominguez
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Poem of the Week, by W.S. Merwin

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Little Horse
– W.S. Merwin

You come from some other forest
do you
little horse
think how long I have known these
deep dead leaves
without meeting you

I belong to no one
I would have wished for you if I had known how
what a long time the place was empty
even in my sleep
and loving it as I did
I could not have told what was missing

what can I show you
I will not ask you if you will stay
or if you will come again
I will not try to hold you
I only hope you will come with me to where I stand
often sleeping and waking
by the patient water
that has no father nor mother

—
For more information on W.S. Merwin, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/w-s-merwin
—
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Poem of the Week, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Spring and Fall: to a Young Child
– Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

—
For more information on Gerard Manley Hopkins, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/284
—
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Poem of the Week, by Ece Temelkuran

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Squirrel
– Ece Temelkuran (translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin)

Truthfully, I ruminated when I came down from the tree.
Had sorrow made me say all these things?
Had someone been with me, they would say at once
that I was ‘deeply wounded.’
I would like to show them
the squirrel that flickers in and out of sight, small as a crumb
but still able to animate the dark forest.

Her soul is surely the picture
of this tranquil elation that quivers and rests inside me.
The squirrel was drawing my path toward the forest.

—
For more information on Ece Temelkuran, please click here.

 

Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

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The Word
– Tony Hoagland

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between “green thread”
and “broccoli” you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,

that also needs accomplishing
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue

but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

—to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen.
—
For more information about Tony Hoagland, please click here:
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